Read-in-Progress

[geraineon]

This is your weekly read-in-progress post~

For spoilers:

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

Comments

[geraineon]

Still incredibly stuck playing Where Winds Meet, but I'm making ambitious plans to *finish* the books I started last year, so we shall see. This week is a little busy, but should still have time for it.

In the meantime, I am eyeing a bunch of audio dramas (which counts, right?) from a rec list of danmei incest on twitter.

[katzenfabrik]

I'm making the same plans!

For me, for some reason, I feel like audio dramas don't 'count' in the same way that audiobooks do. Maybe it's just that I find audiobooks hard to focus on and audio dramas are a little bit easier, so clearly they don't count. Oh, brains.

I enjoyed reading through that list from twitter, btw. :) I have faaaar too many books on the go and in my to-read list to be adding new things, but it's always fun to window shop.

[geraineon]

I suppose it's also coz audio dramas are more like TV but only voices, but audio books are actually someone reading out a book to you.

Mm, I keep adding more and more books to read but time + energy + mood never quite align.

[halfcactus]

What a specific rec list lmfao have fun!

[geraineon]

And I'm smack right in the middle of the target market for that XDD

Thank you!

[lee_bella]

Interesting. Where can I find the rec list of danmei incest? (You can PM me the link if you like.)

[geraineon]

Here you go: https://xcancel.com/qinanyiyu/status/2007473217846362583?s=20

It starts off with adoptive/step-siblings stuff, then as you go down the list, blood related sibling recs start to show up.

[lee_bella]

Thanks!

[duckprintspress]

I started 盗墓笔记 vol. 2 by 南派三叔. I'm managing roughly one page every 20 minutes, so it's slow going, but I feel like I'm understanding a lot so that's nice.

Other than that, I mostly read manga this past week lol.

[katzenfabrik]

Super impressive!!! Did you already finish vol. 1 in Chinese?

[duckprintspress]

no, I don't own a copy of volume 1, the place I bought my print copies didn't have it when I was last there and I haven't had a chance to check again. I've read it in English, tho, so I'm just jumping in.

I've only read one novel in Chinese so far, 我和我对家 (I Ship My Rival x Me) by PEPA, so this is my second.

[katzenfabrik]

You're reading it in print, that's even more impressive! :'D I was sloooowly reading some Chinese fanfics on Pleco a while back and really enjoying it, but I don't think I could do it without the vocab help so close at hand.

Did you like 我和我对家?

[duckprintspress]

I actually find print easier. I have trouble reading a lot on my phone, and the couple times I've tried to read Chinese that way, it's like... it's so easy to look things up that I don't really... try? Like I don't go slow and try to figure it out on my own? So I prefer reading physical books. It's expensive, sigh, but fortunately I have a decent supply and because I'm slow they should last me.

I did like 我和我对家! I'd already read the whole manhua (...repeatedly...) so I knew the gist. The print version was censored, tho, so that was kinda funny. I had trouble with it in general because the pov character uses a ton of slang.

[lee_bella]

Happy reading!

[duckprintspress]

It's going pretty well so far, fingers crossed it keeps up. Only one page left in Chapter 1!

[geraineon]

Jiayou!

[duckprintspress]

谢谢！

[katzenfabrik]

I finally finished Guardian! I was ahead of my book club nearly all the way through, but then in December I got too busy to finish up the last couple of chapters and the extras. It feels good to have got to the end of the story now. I really enjoyed it! I ended up shipping Highlight for spoilers!Guo Changcheng and Chu Shuzhi super hard (actually, I had been since about the first chapter where they interacted with one another). I wasn't expecting the extra where xiao-Guo has to go on a blind date and Chu Shuzhi ends up rescuing him by 'pretending' to be his boyfriend, but I enjoyed it a lot and I think it's incontrovertible tht they got together for real after that. ^__^

Next, I want to catch up with the group read of Panguan on Mastodon and also read The Beauty's Blade now the 7S translation is out.

[ehyde]

Oh yeah, I love those two as a side couple!

Would you be interested in a casual readalong of The Beauty's Blade? I've been meaning to read it soon as well.

[katzenfabrik]

I'd love a casual readalong! It seems like a pretty short book so well-suited to that.

[halfcactus]

I'd love a casual readalong as well (though I expect myself to fall off haha)

[duckprintspress]

I'd join a casual read along too...

[geraineon]

Given the interest in doing a casual read-along, would you like to do it on this comm?

[lee_bella]

I would love to read more about these two characters. priest really teased the readers with these two as a potential couple and never spelled it outright.

[geraineon]

Panguan <33

[lessonsinescapology]

Didn't read any. Got sidetracked by a good Cdrama about tea XD

[halfcactus]

Ooooh which one? /has been extremely out of the loop

[lessonsinescapology]

Glory aka Jade Bone Tea

[geraineon]

I just read the summary on MDL and that sounds fun! Will add to my drama list.

[lessonsinescapology]

It's a solid drama with a good team behind it.

[ehyde]

I'm still enjoying Record of the Missing Sect Master, it has a lot of things I love: secret identity shenanigans, amnesia (combine these two to get an identity so secret, even he doesn't know who he is), and an absolute troll/chessmaster combination of a main character. And an ML who knows a lot more than he's letting on but is too busy pining to say anything useful.

The thing it does not have nearly enough of is fight scenes! Wuxia is supposed to be the genre I can count on for well-crafted fight scenes! But I'm only about a quarter of the way through so hopefully this will change.

Also pleasantly surprised that spoilers*Ye You got his memories back fairly early on; and now we move on to a different level of deception (he has not told his shixiong that he remembers. Neither of them has yet informed the reader *what* they're remembering. * The pacing of the various reveals has been very good!

[geraineon]

I did enjoy Record of the Missing Sect Master a lot. There are some fights! But it's also half wuxia murder mystery revenge I guess XD

[larryhammer]

Not c-novel, but adjacent: An American with a Chinese System by P.T. Brainum, explicitly inspired by web novels. After dying in the act of doing a good deed, the MC is revived with a System where he accrues karma points for his actions, which can be used to purchase skills/upgrades. The skill names are all chengyu (lol) that give no clear idea what the skill actually does even when you do know the idiomatic meaning (rofl!), and they’re badly machine-translated into English (lmao!!) — the System only knows Chinese, you see, and has to convert all its labels and descriptions for him using an online translator. And by “badly” I of course mean “hilariously” for anyone who knows the actual chengyu. (I recognized about half, so I got in a language lesson with my cheesy entertainment — win-win.)

It’s 1/10 of a Journey to the West long, i.e. about typical size for a Western novel, and the first quarter is completely devoted to the MC min-maxing his skill tree (or trying to through the MTL haze) before anything resembling an actual plot shows up, by which point he’s leveled up enough we’re into standard power fantasy territory. (Not that extended min-maxing is a problem per se, I like LitRPG for a reason, but too much of a good thing is indeed A Thing.) The resolution honestly isn’t really believable, or even make sense, but it was a fun couple hours getting there.

Chengyu skill names smh lmfao

[geraineon]

There seems to be more and more web novels inspired English books now, which I think is an interesting phenomena.

What's your fav badly translated skill name?

[larryhammer]

Yeah -- the earlier wave of LitRPG were more clearly inspired directly from video games, but ones with actual Systems with agency is new and clearly Chinese inspired.

I'd have to dig through the appendix (yes, there's an appendix listing them all) to find a couple doozies. Not badly translated, but 箭在弦上, 不得不发, rendered as "arrow in the middle of the bow must be used", is the name for a skill that causes tasks or orders for goods to be performed/fulfilled faster by others, which is a prime example of the name being Not At All Helpful.

Ah, here's one: 按图索骥 is rendered "to check a picture to search for a horse", which, um. Almost.

[silverblade219]

Trying the Chinese Lore Podcast again, currently up to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms retelling. It enjoying it so far, and it has transcriptions available on the website which is helpful.

Also read one more chapter of ORV, still in Paradise arc. Mostly been reading Lout of the Count's Family volume 6, it is getting closer to one of my favorite scenes from when I read the fan tl.

[geraineon]

I appreciate transcriptions! I am not the best at paying attention when listening to podcasts, so they are a life saver and makes it more likely I'll listen.

[lee_bella]

It's great that there are transcriptions for the Chinese Lore Podcast. Thank you for posting about it. :)

[lee_bella]

I finished I am the Father of the Villain (我给反派当爸爸) by Lin Ang Si (林盎司), a lovely found family, family feud, revenge tale, showbiz, romance, kidfic and transmigration story all rolled into one. It's also really long. The found family is probably the best part about this story. I'm not normally into kidfic, but this one is quite heartwarming.

[geraineon]

Mm, the kidfic part of a story is usually don't quite badly/uninspired, imo. Good that it's done better here. Usually, it just feels like the kids are accessories.

[lee_bella]

This is mainly a found family story, and the two kids are parts of the main cast. The villain in the title is one of the kids. I would say this novel is about two adult men and two young boys forming a family due to various circumstances, finding happiness and support that they sorely needed, and overcoming past trauma (partly through having a support system and partly through getting revenge on the people who wronged them).

[douqi]

I'm halfway through entertainment industry baihe Salieri and Mozart and it's unexpectedly fun. It's pretty light-hearted but also earnest and takes what its characters are going through seriously. And honestly I'm delighted that there is actual discussion of the craft of singing (the leads in this one are mainly singers) threaded throughout the story.

[geraineon]

I remember you mentioning this title before! Did you start it some time ago? I do love that there's actual discussion of the craft XD Oftentimes, professions are just set decorations.

[douqi]

Yes! Finished it a few days ago.

[yueliangist]

it is saturday, but anyway

i recently finally started a baihe that has been on my reading list for 2 years (while it was still getting written!): Mist by 葱由丙. i'm only on chapter 5/66, but so far its really doable in terms of difficulty which surprised me!! its 191k characters long, a little longer than my last finished read so hopefully i can get in a binge mood and speedrun this since i was hoping to start translating in 2025, but now its january 2026 and i still have yet to finish a baihe i can use as a test subject

i told myself i'd continue with 没有心跳的我其实也很慌 (an 800k supernatural/horror baihe), but i am nothing if not impulsive LOL (currently on chapter 50/254)

[geraineon]

What is Mist about?

and 800k words sounds really daunting XD;;